Silence, Meet Singularity

Summer brings with it a lot of dead air.  From beach traffic to bathroom lines at the ballpark, awkward silences lurk everywhere.  But fear not: just as you can arm yourself against sunburn and mosquitoes, you can prepare for lapses in conversation.  Enter Ray Kurzweil — Jewish super-intellect; unabashed Futurist; conversational lighter fluid.

Kurzweil is everywhere these days.  He’s the star of a viral video about robotic red-blood cells, full-immersion virtual reality, and “experience beamers.” He’s got a website shilling Milk Thistle and Evening Primrose Oil, supplements designed to help you live forever. And, with a new documentary due later this year (a companion to his 650-page book, “The Singularity is Near,”), Kurzweil is taking the national stage to trumpet the arrival of the Singularity, “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.”

So who is this guy?  Born in 1948 to two artists who fled Austria before WWII, Kurzweil was just another Jewish kid from Queens.  That is, until he became a computer-programmer whiz, inventing programs that vaulted him onto national television and meetings with the president.  From MIT, he would go on to invent revolutionary text-to-speech technologies for the blind, earning the respect (and business partnership) of Stevie Wonder.  And he was just warming up.  All told, over the course of a career spanning technology, consulting, healthcare, education, and music technology, Kurzweil has received twelve honorary degrees, the U.S. National Medal of Technology, and become a millionaire many times over.

Lately, the man that FORBES Magazine calls “the ultimate thinking machine” has been writing books and delivering speeches that describe an imminent moment – the Singularity — when the lives of humans and computers fundamentally merge.  The implications of this event are, shall we say, significant.

Take it away, Ray:

As we move toward a nonbiological existence, we will gain the means of “backing ourselves up” (storing the key patterns underlying our knowledge, skills, personality), thereby eliminating most causes of death as we know it. [323]

We will not notice the absence of many of our organs, such as the liver and the pancreas, since we do not directly experience their operation.  But the skin, which includes our primary and secondary sex organs, may prove to be an organ that we actually want to keep… [307]

Another intriguing – and highly speculative – possibility is to send a computational process back in time through a “wormhole” in space-time. [140]

 These snippets provide only a glimpse of “The Singularity is Near,” Kurzweil’s sprawling 2005 opus.  (A more streamlined description of the Singularity from New York Times can be found here.)

So this summer, when you hear the Ferris wheel grind to a shrieking halt, ensuring a lengthy stretch of mid-air silence, don’t freak out.  Summon your inner Kurzweil, turn to your date, and say, “Hey baby, wanna live forever?”